Building a feature complete bookmarking app with Vue.js, Express and Sequelize ORM

Summary

This tutorial walks through building a Node.js, MySQL and front-end framework (Vue.js) application. Client side code is bundled with webpack.

Here is the github link for viewing the application source code: https://github.com/connor11528/sequelize-bookmarks

Purpose

The reason I am writing this is showcase how SQL, Node.js and modern client-side Javascript frameworks (Vue.js with Webpack) can all play nicely together. Over the course of my development career I have moved from PHP to Ruby to Node.js. For all of last year MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node.js) development has been very popular. Now though, Angular 1.x is showing its age. Express is still the dominant Node.js web framework, but more robust solutions are being built (such as Trails.js and Adonis.js) that leverage the power of SQL. I thought it was about time to understand how to work with a SQL database and Javascript, specifically Node.js.

The App

This application is capable of Creating, Reading, Updating and Deleting (CRUD) Authors and Books from a MySQL database. Each Book belongs to an Author and a each Author has many books. For a great review of how SQL database associations work…